The eighteenth century, the “century of philosophy”

The eighteenth century, called the century of philosophy in the book’s opening editorial warning, is more than a date: it is the standard against which the editor disputes the plausibility of the events. Published in 1782, Liaisons dangereuses places its intrigues close to its own era, then makes that apparent nearness part of a satirical argument about morality, social reputation, and fiction’s claim to represent life.

Publication and Historical Frame

The book bears the date 1782. Its editor’s warning challenges the suggestion that the collected letters are authentic and offers strong grounds for treating them as a novel. The events are presented as occurring in a time and society close to the publication’s own, a choice the editor says undermines the author’s attempt at verisimilitude.

The Century of Philosophy

The editor invokes the period’s reputation for enlightenment only to turn it into irony. The warning pretends that the diffusion of knowledge has made all men honest and all women modest and reserved, a claim whose exaggerated certainty exposes the gap between public ideals and the disreputable conduct depicted in the letters. The century’s self-image thus becomes part of the book’s satire rather than a neutral historical label.

The Dispute Over Plausibility

To argue that the characters’ conduct cannot belong to the present, the editor points to two supposedly unthinkable outcomes: a young woman with an income of sixty thousand livres becoming a nun, and a young, beautiful female president dying of grief. The reasoning is deliberately circular: if the same causes would produce the same effects, the absence of such cases in contemporary life supposedly proves that the events must have happened elsewhere or in another time. The editor’s confident dismissal therefore leaves the reader with a productive uncertainty: the work claims proximity to contemporary customs while its framing voice insists that its world is foreign to them.